


thalassophobia

by kosy



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Character Resurrection, Drift Compatibility, Gen, Jaylen Comes Back Wrong, legally i am required to write pacrim AUs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28434339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: There’s nothing outwardly wrong with Jaylen other than the unnatural quiet. It’s just that if you ever try to drift with her, she eats you alive.
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers & Mike Townsend, Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Sutton Dreamy, side Tillman Henderson/Declan Suzanne
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24





	thalassophobia

**Author's Note:**

> what are we doing if not writing pacific rim AUs truly!
> 
> for context, this is set in something like season seven. thanks for reading, and i hope you all enjoy this self-indulgent mean little AU!!

_ Don’t try and drift with Jaylen.  _

It wasn’t an announcement given in any official capacity. Technically, it wasn’t an announcement at all. Might as well have been, though. Within two weeks of her return, everybody knew it even if nobody was willing to climb up on a table in the dining hall and yell it out for posterity. It was a fact obvious enough to be in every shared glance:  _ do not try and drift with Jaylen. _

Not because of anything she’d done outright. Mostly she keeps to herself. Takes her meals to her quarters and eats there. Early to rise, doesn't speak unless spoken to, never late to a meeting or drill. Maintains the sense of decorum that most people in the shatterdomes had given up on years ago when it became evident that none of the higher-ups gave enough of a shit to keep funding them. 

There’s nothing outwardly wrong with her other than the unnatural quiet. It’s just that if you ever try to drift with her, she eats you alive.

Allison Abbott was the first one to try it after she came back. They’d been in a band together before all this. Close, sorta, or at least that’s what everyone said. That was the funny thing about Jaylen. She’d been a celebrity even before she became the first real jaeger pilot lost to a kaiju. Everyone’s favorite, skilled like nobody else, but these days you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who knows a single thing about her. There are probably plenty of old comrades of hers wandering around the base, but whoever they are, they aren’t talking. 

Anyways. Abbott was the first. She volunteered, and even if she hadn’t, she would have been the obvious choice. Tough and snarky and smart and unyielding, exactly the kind of person you want dealing with an undead ex-pilot who’s only sticking around because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Added bonus of having known her before everything went to hell. They loaded her up with Jaylen into just a simulator of the real drift. 

Thirty-seven seconds after the neural handshake initiated, Abbott crumpled and hit the ground, knees first and then chest and head in a series of dull thuds. Her eyes were wide open when they turned her over. One was blood red. 

Jaylen stayed standing where she was, still attached to the machine, eyes half-lidded, every breath sharp. Her hands were shaking, but maybe not as much as they should have been. 

Abbott was on mandatory bedrest for a few days, then a week. In the end, it took her a fortnight to get back on her feet. She still hasn’t made it back into the drift. 

They tried Tillman Henderson next. Cocksure asshole. Maybe they just wanted to knock him down a peg. He made it a little further, though. Forty-four seconds. But he didn’t even have it in him to bitch at the medics when they hauled him to the med bay afterward, just spat blood onto the linoleum and craned his neck to stare at Jaylen as he was carried out of the simulation room, pale-faced and panting. 

Henderson wasn’t the last one. He probably should’ve been. After him, nobody lasted longer than twenty-five seconds. 

* * *

In the med bay:

“It’s not fuckin’ worth it, man.” 

“Wait, for real? So, what, we just go and drop her back in the breach? Like, ‘well, whoopsies, we tried, better luck next time I guess’?”

“Fucking—why not?” 

“Because that’s not how shit works, Tilly.” 

_ “Tillman.”  _

“Yeah, okay. That’s not how shit works,  _ Tillman. _ And God forbid I call my boyfriend a fucking petname—” 

“Declan.” 

“Yeah! That’s my name, dude! You got it in one!” 

_ “Declan. _ Fuck off. Look, man. I saw the inside of her brain. It’s fucked in there.” 

“I hear trauma does that to you, Tillman, yeah.” 

“Oh, and I’d have no  _ fucking _ idea about trauma, would I?”

“Fine. Point taken.” 

“I’m right, okay? I know what the fuck I’m talking about. I was _ in there, _ dude. I know.” 

“From what you’ve told me, she didn’t let you in at all.” 

“Yeah, that’s what I’m fuckin’ saying, Declan. Jesus. I was in there, or I was as close as she was gonna let me get. I was just butting up against a fucking wall, and you know how I am with that kinda thing—I fling myself at it til people get tired of me and let me in or I brute force that shit down myself. But actually,  _ fuck _ all that, that’s not how drifting works anyway, because the entire fucking point is that you let somebody in. You don’t— _ God. _ Fuck this, man.” 

“...you don’t what?” 

“You don’t fucking do whatever  _ she _ did to me! It was like—I don’t know, like she was tearing me open. I opened my mind or heart or whatever, right, exactly what they teach you to, and. I don’t know how to describe it, I just—I felt like I was fucking burning or getting ripped up or—dude, I thought I was going to  _ die. _ Genuinely. I feel like I survived something. Something  _ big, _ like a hurricane or a wildfire or an earthquake or a goddamn kaiju. I mean. You saw my fuckin’ brain scans.” 

“Tillman, I d—yeah. I did.” 

“Yeah. Well. There you go.” 

“...”

“What?”

“Nothing, just—hey, try and get some sleep, alright? You look—” 

“Go away, Declan. Just.” 

“I, uh. Okay. Yeah.”

* * *

They cycle Jaylen through most of the pilots. Some of them argue and resist and get forced in anyway. Some of them keep their heads down and go along with it and tap out of the simulation as soon as the neural handshake is initiated. Some of them try, actually  _ try _ to connect with her out of compassion or pity or sheer bullheadedness. All of them break against her, as inconsequential and infinite as waves on cliffs. 

Sutton is just there to clean up after. 

Two medics cart Declan Suzanne’s limp form out of the room on the stretcher always kept just outside the entrance to the simulation room. They make a token effort to hide it from Jaylen’s view, but of course she knows it’s there. It’s a formality, leaving the door closed and the medics all the way out in the hall. Each time, everybody pretends they don’t know how this will end. 

“So,” Sutton starts, carefully picking her way across the room toward Jaylen. The floor’s littered with thousands of dollars’ worth of broken equipment—Suzanne had started seizing and thrashing before they passed out entirely, slammed their arms into some of the more delicate instruments—and she has to watch her step, but even after two full months of Jaylen being back, being  _ alive, _ it feels inherently wrong to take her eyes off her even for a moment. Like she’ll disappear. Or transform. 

Sutton hates that everybody is afraid of her. She hates that they’re right to be.

“So,” Jaylen echoes, a beat too late to be natural. Her voice is rough from disuse, and she’s swaying on her feet. Eyes still shut. 

“How do you think that went?” 

Her response is immediate. “Fuck you.” 

She sighs. “Post-simulation psych eval, Jaylen. It’s mandatory. I don’t control the questions; you know that.” Maybe five years ago, the hostility would’ve rattled her. These days, after half a decade of seeing what she’s seen, it takes more than that to give her pause. 

“You know nothing’s stopping me from lying, right?”

She can’t hold back a wry chuckle. “No offense, but you’re a shitty liar. Lie or don’t. It doesn’t make much of a difference to me. I’ll figure you out in the end.” Finally, Sutton makes her way around the broken glass and twisted up metal to stand in front of her, and Jaylen opens her eyes. “Plus, it’s not like they’re gonna let you stop no matter what you say. So.” 

Jaylen looks at her for a long silent moment, unreadable, before saying flatly, “Then I’d say it went pretty damn good. That lasted, what? Twenty-one seconds, give or take? Longer than anyone’s made it in the last, I dunno, week or so.” 

“Declan’s a stubborn kid,” she tells her. “He wanted to be the one.” Also probably wanted to prove something to Tillman, the idiot. Then— “Wait, you were timing it?” 

She shrugs. “Sure.” 

Her stomach twists dully. “What for?” 

“Posterity.” 

“Right.” 

“What other reason would I have?” Jaylen asks waspishly. Shifts a little in the harness, tugging a wrist at one of the bonds. Usually, a pilot would just stand next to the simulation machine, the nodes attached to their temples and foreheads by electrical wires. Not Jaylen and her would-be drift partners. The nodes are clamped onto their skulls. It takes a key to unlock them. They try to make the straps connecting their arms to the machine and wrapping around the legs look official, like they were supposed to have been there all along, but they’re so obviously improvised restraints Sutton can barely bring herself to look at them. 

She sighs again and reaches out her hands in silent question. Jaylen’s head jerks in a nod, and Sutton begins to undo the tethers connecting Jaylen to the machine. “I don’t know, you tell me.” 

“Next question,” she says. 

“Jaylen.” 

“Next  _ question.”  _

She bites back yet another sigh. “Fine. On a scale of one to four, one being not at all and four being nearly every day, how often have you been bothered b—” 

“Oh Jesus Christ, can we drop the fake therapy bullshit?” Jaylen snaps. “I’m back, alright? You said yourself it doesn’t matter what I say here—” 

“I can get you removed from active duty,” Sutton rushes out, and the silence that falls over the room is so immediate and complete she wants to take it back as soon as it’s out of her mouth. Instead, she grits her teeth and presses on. “If you keep this up. Commissioner Macmillan wants you here, don’t get me wrong, but if I lobbied hard enough, compiled the  _ extensive _ evidence that you shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of a jaeger, much less  _ piloting _ one, he’d cave. It’d be better from a PR standpoint to get you back in the cockpit, yes, but the fact that we recovered you at all is enough of a net win if we can get you to lie low.” 

She doesn’t know anymore if she’s threatening Jaylen or pleading with her. 

Either way Jaylen laughs bitterly. “You and I both know that wouldn’t happen.” 

“Frankly, I get the feeling they’d rather have that mess on their hands than all our pilots being out of commission in the middle of a  _ war _ just because we kept throwing them to the wolves. Plus, you’re military. You’ve been here long enough that you don’t have anyone or anything outside of this building and you know it. It wouldn’t be too hard for them to keep you quiet.” 

“Yeah,” she says, unyielding. A mocking smile, almost familiar. “I bet. But if they think I’m going down peacefully–” 

Sutton snorts. “No. I’m certain they expect a fight.”    


“Yeah,” she repeats. Rolls her newly freed wrist around experimentally, the first flicker of discomfort showing on her face. “You know, that doesn’t surprise me either. But again, you said that no matter what I said—” 

“I wasn’t lying then. I said no matter what  _ you _ say here. What I say later is different.” 

For a second, Jaylen just stares at her furiously, every muscle tense, only to slump again, whatever fire had been burning there dying all over again in seconds. 

She just looks exhausted now. Beaten, worn, finished. A lioness with no teeth. 

Sutton knows better than to be fooled, of course. Jaylen was never anything but dangerous. Not really. Not even before all this. 

At the start of the war, before November 19th, 2013, before the jaeger went down just a quarter mile west of the breach, before Mike and their metal monster were hauled screaming back to shore, before. Before. She was still dangerous then. Just in a bright way, that sharp burning kind of tension that draws people in instead of shoving them out. The prodigy pilot, their brilliant war hero. Intelligent and strong and proud and fucking suicidally brave and just a little mean. People loved her for it. 

Sutton loved her for it. 

But Jaylen died. And came back. These days she doesn’t say much, bows her head to all the right people, but Sutton’s watched somewhere around seventy simulated drift attempts with her at this point. When the neural handshake is initiated, the other participant spasms in their harnesses within seconds. Writhes unnaturally, strains against the tethers. Jaylen stands stock still. Her brow furrows, maybe. There’s a vacant smile behind her lips. She looks either completely hollow or full to bursting with something Sutton doesn’t understand, something she can’t even begin to hold in her brain. Hard to say which.

“Sutton,” Jaylen says, toneless, and Sutton jerks back to herself, realizes she’s fallen still with her hands just resting there on Jaylen’s forearms. 

“Yeah,” she mutters, then clears her throat and says again, “Yeah, sorry,” and goes back to work, wrenching the tethers lose with a level of force that probably borders on unnecessary.

They haven’t so much as slept in the same bed since—well, since the morning of November 18th, 2013. Sutton hasn’t asked. When they met, they were barely more than twenty years old, shiny and young and ready for the kind of fight that defines a whole generation, a whole world. 

Now Jaylen is back but still gone and Sutton is. Sutton is whatever the hell she is. The world changed. It isn’t the kind of place that lets two people fall asleep in each other’s arms and wake up smiling anymore. It’s hard to imagine that it ever had been. 

She’s aware of Jaylen watching her as she works. Feels her gaze heavy on her bent neck like something physical. There’s no room in either of them for regret. They lost their right to that a long time ago. 

But when she turns to leave, Jaylen catches her wrist. She doesn’t tug Sutton back or do anything at all, really, just holds on for a long moment, staring. There is nothing in her eyes that Sutton recognizes now, but these are eyes she has loved for years. So she looks back and says nothing until Jaylen lets go, turning her head down and away. Her fingers were warm. Somehow, Sutton hadn’t really expected that. 

* * *

When Jaylen died, Mike broke. It was as simple and awful as that. 

Sutton hadn’t been in charge of the drift psychology unit yet, mainly because there weren’t any department heads back then in the first place. Nobody knew more than anybody else. Nobody knew anything at all. 

Paradoxically, those were the easiest years, those electric first few where everyone was rushing around wild-eyed and clueless and wholeheartedly in it together. The scientific world had been waiting for the first mid-drift death with equal parts fear and a grotesque sort of anticipation. It was new ground. As a kid, Sutton would have killed to be a part of something so unknown, so vast. 

Then Mike came back from a mission alone. 

It’d been the first category three kaiju. A hulking thing with too many pale, unblinking eyes and talons the size of the jaeger’s entire fist. Jaylen and Mike were so hopelessly outclassed it was almost funny. 

There’s civilian drone footage of the fight on YouTube, some maniac who boated fifty miles out into the Pacific in the middle of a storm just to get one grainy video. It’s about three minutes long and has gotten somewhere around one and a quarter billion views in five years. Sutton has watched it more times than she’d like to admit. Especially recently. 

It’s like this: the camera work is shitty from the outset. 

Kaiju fights are still novel enough at this point for an opportunity like this to be wildly exciting to anybody who hasn’t lost someone to an attack, and whoever the operator is, they’re trying to get the best footage they can without risking their fancy new toy getting sideswiped straight into the waves, dancing between rushing in far too close and zooming out so wide you can hardly make out the dark form of the jaeger. 

It’s obvious within seconds that the mech is outclassed, the kaiju twice its size and still somehow almost as fast. But Mike and Jaylen still manage to put up a fair fight for the first minute and a half. One of them—Sutton’s still not sure who—gets in a blow right to the jaw, knocking its head sideways, and the drone zooms in to catch a jagged, yellowing tooth the size of a small car crash into the sea. The kaiju bellows, and the drone operator startles back with an involuntary jerk of the controller, laughing in gleeful terror, then presses the aircraft in closer, fighting gale-force winds the whole way. 

There are three timestamps that show up a lot in the comment section. She has them memorized. 1:47, 2:33, and 2:58. 

At 1:47, there’s this gap in the action as the kaiju draws back, head low, and the jaeger rebalances itself. A moment of eerie stillness in the storm. This—Sutton knows, the cameraman knows, the commenters know, the  _ world _ knows—is when Jaylen and Mike should have fallen back. Waited for the reinforcements that were on their way. Jessica and Sebastian Telephone were coming, for fuck’s sake. Facing down two titans like that, there was no way the kaiju could have won. 

But the jaeger stands its ground, its back to the unseen shore, and the kaiju lifts its head again.

At 2:33, the kaiju lunges, and its raw power is suddenly horrifyingly obvious. Its talons sink into the metal hide of the jaeger like it’s nothing, like it’s flesh, and it pulls, and it  _ rips. _ A tiny dark speck and ten tons of metal fall into the ocean. Halfway carved out, the jaeger staggers sideways, flailing to keep its balance. The drone zooms in tight. If you squint, you can see Mike’s pale face screaming into the storm. 

At 2:58, the jaeger— _ Mike _ —fires into the kaiju’s chest too many times to count and watches it sink. 

At 3:02, the jaeger collapses into the sea after it and the video ends. 

Jess and Sebastian’d arrived seconds later and fished the jaeger back out, carried it back to the base in their arms. Safe. Like a kid fallen asleep on the car ride home, some part of Sutton had thought hazily, watching them stumble into the base with what remained of the jaeger cradled tight to their chest. Mike, quiet, sweet, gentle-smiling Mike, was sobbing so hard he couldn’t breathe, face twisted and wet. 

He didn’t stop for a long, long time. 

Nagomi had asked Sutton if she wanted to take the rest of the night off, considering. She stared at them, blank, and they looked away and murmured  _ sorry _ and the whole d-psych unit spent the next hours hovering uselessly as the medics checked Mike over and found nothing wrong other than some scrapes and bruises, a mild concussion. 

Their department had suspected that’d be the case, of course. They weren't idiots. Through the months d-psych was consulting on the new drift tech, they’d wondered if it was really right to tie people together like that, make them so inextricable from each other’s selves when loss is a foregone conclusion in this kind of fight. 

It didn’t matter. Ends justify the means. This was humanity at stake, and only a human solution had a chance in hell of working. So, the engineers said, the phantom limbs and phantom lives would just be something that they would deal with when the time came. 

The time came. They tried their best with Mike. He was trying too. He never sat alone at dinner, and he always showed up on time for drills and training, and he went to all the mandated therapy sessions, and he answered every question d-psych threw at him. He did everything right. It should have worked. He should have gotten better, his drifts with Betsy should’ve stabilized more, he should have been able to grieve and then keep going.

But Mike just broke after Jaylen died. Part of him drowned with her, and there wasn’t any coming back from that. 

When he turned off his comms and dove into the breach to find what was left of her five years later, no one even pretended to be surprised. 

* * *

Jaylen walks through the concrete halls of the shatterdome, and everyone stays out of her way. 

The corridors really aren’t engineered for avoiding somebody who scares the shit out of you, low-ceilinged and cramped; there’s barely space for four people to walk shoulder to shoulder, but everyone manages to duck out of her path anyway. The ingenuity of the UN army really never fails to amaze. They press themselves up against the walls and stare at their feet like Jaylen’s going to—what, pull a knife on them? Break their brains just by force of proximity? Throw them into the Pacific? She’s not fuckin’ _ rabid, _ she’s just— 

_ Yeah, good question, huh, Jay? _ some part of her asks, the part that sounds like Mike did when he was in one of his more self-righteous moods.  _ What _ are _ you right now?  _ She doesn’t have to answer. It fades out again pretty fast. 

She shoulders the door to her quarters open and starts unlacing her boots. Pauses. Laces them back up again. She wishes she still had her earbuds or her old guitar or some books or anything at all. Her room as it is now is a glorified cell. 

It’s the boredom that gets to her. Before, there was always  _ something _ . There was a pickup basketball game or training or band practice or a sparring match or a drift simulation or some science department’s ethically dubious experiment or a friend who wanted to see her. Now she sits in silence. Or she sleeps. Or she goes to the gym and runs on the treadmill in the back left corner until her legs are shaking and she can’t breathe and her head is empty of anything that could—

Until her head is empty. Or emptier. And then she wanders. Nobody tries to stop her from going anywhere. If she takes the right hallways, nobody sees her at all. 

She doubts she’s allowed to leave the shatterdome so instead she learns it. The underground tunnels, the laboratories closed by underfunding, the defunct jaeger graveyards. Thousands of people swarming through this massive complex at every hour and so much of it is left in a perpetual state of emptiness anyway. 

She keeps expecting somebody to come find her.

Her newest haunt is the highest catwalk in the hangar where her old jaeger is kept. Nobody’s piloting it any time soon. Half of it’s still torn off anyway. Guess they decided it wasn't worth the cost of repairing. She tries to hold that in her head long enough to feel something about it. It slips into blue and she doesn’t catch it. Gone now. She has moments of lucidity, snatches of conversation and touch and sounds and feelings but there’s a strong possibility that she doesn’t think about things anymore beyond that. 

Otherwise it’s dead air and sense memory: the silhouette of a childhood. Music, laughter, years at the Academy, drifting, piloting a jaeger for the first time. Bad love that she doesn’t regret. Good love that she almost does. Sun comes in through the window and the sheets are warm. Mike screams as she falls. Saltwater. The coldness of the deep. The blinding heatglow of the breach. A leviathan. Many leviathans. Bone. Blue. How are bodies supposed to decompose in water? Not like this and something crucial in her is pushed aside to make room. Saltwater. The surface, hands. Fragments of numbers and counting. Glass on the floor, an argument she might have even been all there for, hands again, hands again. Next time she should hold on tighter. She won’t. 

_ There is something in my head and it has teeth, _ she thinks. 

It’s the first full thought she has had in a while. A few hours, maybe. Could be more. There should be panic somewhere in there. She flexes her fingers, holds two of them to her neck, stares straight ahead, and her pulse is so steady. 

Sometimes she looks at people she’s supposed to know from before and she doesn’t recognize their faces. Sometimes she does. It varies by the day. She should probably tell Sutton about that next time they talk. But she never asks the right questions, and if the right answers exist Jaylen hasn’t found them yet. 

Regardless she’s still expecting somebody to walk up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder and say hello, sit down and swing their legs out over the railing into open space next to hers. Sutton or Allison or Teddy or even Tillman. None of them do. Anyway it wouldn’t save her even if there’s something in there left to save. She’s been spoiling for a fight, something tangible and bloody, the kind of thing you feel in your teeth and behind your eyes and under your nails, the kind of thing you feel like a fishhook caught in your cheek. Spoiling for a fight and not much else. Maybe they’re right to avoid her in the halls. 

Jaylen spends most of her time disappearing. Something else lives in the space she leaves, and nobody will come to find her. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! the moral is [rifles through notes] uhhhhh you can't be half-drifting and half-dead in the breach for five years without becoming a little more Like Them than you should be. if you wanted something deeper than "monsterification fucked up and cool" i am sorry. you can find me on tumblr @fourteenthidol if you're interested in seeing more stuff from me. if you left a comment/kudos, it'd make my day, and thanks again for stopping by!! <3


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